This paper asks whether, and under what conditions, the new media environment shifts the communication power balance in favour of social media ‘citizenry’ in the EU digital public sphere, thus challenging the legitimacy of EU institutions and of its political decisions. Our assumption is that online media and social media in particular, have actually made it possible for individual political actors to claim independence from the mainstream media’s filtering/gatekeeping and framing processes. At the same time, citizens have gained a strong foothold in shaping public discourse. We can also observe the agenda-setting power of social media, whereby the content of mainstream news reports is inspired and shaped by tweets or Facebook postings of political or civil society actors, or by general Twitter/Facebook trends. This is not to suggest that mainstream news media have become obsolete, but rather that there is a shift in the public communication dynamics or the balance within the European public sphere. Our paper adopts a ‘hybrid media system’ approach and collects empirical evidence that explores these assumptions in the context of the European refugee crisis and investigates the implications of such a power shift and transformation of public communication flows on the EU polity and the European public sphere. The hybrid media system perspective takes continuous feedback and interactions between older and newer media for granted, thus placing the role of online and social media in a broader media/public sphere context, enabling us to explore the affordances, functions and main impact of the different media. Such an approach is crucial if we are to understand where social media’s communication power lies. Using online tools for extracting Twitter and Facebook data and for collecting online news reports, we first reconstruct the social media 'history' of the refugee crisis and to pinpoint triggers of social media debate ‘spikes’, main actors and frames. Subsequently, we analyse our data with softwares for semi-supervised text analysis and discuss the conditions under which social media are having an impact on the communication power balance within the European public sphere.
